On 6/9/2010 11:27 AM, jim evans wrote:
On Wed, 09 Jun 2010 11:21:28 -0500, Hell
wrote:

On 6/9/2010 10:13 AM, jim evans wrote:
This is a Sunbeam LeChef food processor, Catalog # 14-11. We
inherited it from my wife's mother. It's at least 20 years old. It
sat unused for about 15 years until we developed a need for it about 9
months ago. Since then we have used it many times. It has always
worked properly.

Our dog has no teeth so we use it to grind kibble into a powder. It
has worked great for this, week in and week out. A few nights ago
when we started to grind our regular three cups of kibble the cutter
blade rose on it's support post until it reached the lid. This was
high enough that it came off the center post, began to wobble and made
a disturbing bumping sound.

We tried to grind the same batch about five or six times. It runs for
a short time, then repeats the behavior. By the end it had gotten to
the powder stage and the blade quit rising. To test it I ran it with
nothing in the bowl and again with water -- it will run properly
apparently forever this way.

Anybody know what's causing this?

It's often due to overloading the bowl. Food processors I've owned
usually caution about that happening. Try reducing the amount ground
by one-third to one-half and see if it helps.

Thanks for the reply. After it started happening we cut back the
amount to a third (one cup) and it still happens. After that we
slowly poured in the feed tube -- it happened before we got even one
cup in.

Well, the next guess would be that the blade is no longer sharp enough
to process the load as efficiently as it used to. Have you tried a
combination of a smaller amount and pulsing the machine, instead of
having the blade run non-stop? The pauses between action might give
the kibble enough time to settle back down in the bowl. The only other
possible solution I can think of would be to add a liquid to the bowl
to moisten the kibble as it grinds, keeping it down low - but unless
you're going to feed it immediately, that wouldn't work.

If you're willing to invest in another machine, I'd recommend getting
a coffee grinder for the kibble. Those are amazing at how fast they
can render even fairly hard stuff to powder. I use mine to grind hard
spices.